


guard and rule all things

by prongs117



Category: Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 14:55:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20677247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prongs117/pseuds/prongs117
Summary: “You know I will mess up before you’re halfway to Vysnia.”Or, Mirnatius tries to live up to Irina's expectations.





	guard and rule all things

Two days after Irina left for Vysnia I began to get worried. Not for her, she can take care of herself and if anything happened I would be sure to hear about it. No, I was worried for me. When she told me she needed to go to Vysnia to visit her ailing father I thought it might be nice for me to have my space again so I said she could stay as long as she wanted. Mind you, she wasn’t really asking my permission but we like to keep up the fiction that I actually have some authority over the tsarina.

So no Irina for a month, it sounded like a holiday. And I sorely needed a holiday after all the mind-numbing council meetings and banquets she dragged me to where I had to pretend to remember who everyone was and care enough to ask after their daughter, mistress, or prized horse. Not to mention that every day for a week before she left, she insisted on instructing me how to manage the many charitable endeavours she had going on in the capital and she had a _lot_ going on. I didn’t even know half of it until she told me. It seemed my darling tsarina had involved herself in almost everything in Koron from the housing of destitute veterans to the feeding of abandoned dogs. I guess she really felt bad about those squirrels.

I don’t know how she kept it all straight in her head and now she was leaving me in charge. At one point in these interminable meetings I told her I wasn’t going to remember any of it and she should just stay if she didn’t want everything to go up in flames. Unfortunate choice of words but I had been listening to her for three hours and I was exhausted.

“Mirnatius, what would it take for you to care about what happens to your people?” 

We’ve had this conversation, well argument, many times before and none of my answers ever satisfied her. 

“Well, I married you and you care enough about them for both of us.” That ended with an impromptu lecture on my lack of empathy and her leaving the room soon after.

“The fact that I agreed to bed you every night should tell you all you need to know.” _That_ one I shouldn’t have said. I don’t even know why I did since I obviously didn’t mean it. Anyway that ended with me in an empty bed for a week until I scraped up enough courage to ask her to come back. Incidentally, making up with Irina is a lot of fun.

But this time I only stared at her, the most capable person I knew, dressed in her favorite gray gown and not a scrap of jewelry on except the pearl earrings I presented her with yesterday. “You know I will mess up before you’re halfway to Vysnia.”

“I don’t believe that. You have the ability to rule well and the people regard you with affection.”

I scoffed. “I highly doubt that.”

“They do,” she insisted. “Goodness knows half of it is because of your looks but the rest, well, they see you as their savior from the grasping nobles.”

“And how would you know this my dear? You hardly leave the palace unless under heavy guard.” That last part was because of me, something else we fought about but that’s another story.

“I have my ways,” she said. I bet she has.

“Alright,” I sighed. “Since you have so much faith in me, let’s have it again. Start from the beginning, the one about providing for destitute spiders.”

“Spinsters. Destitute spinsters.”

“Right.”

So I listened to Irina and wrote down notes and made an effort to make sense of what she was telling me. I had to make it up to the squirrels after all.

I thought I had everything under control after she left and on the first day it was actually nice to have people look to me for orders for a change. But then two days out and the problems started. I got the endowments for the spinsters and loans for new merchants mixed up, a shipment of much-needed timber to the northern ports vanished en route, my valet came down with a cold and on top of it all, I hadn’t been sleeping well. 

I didn’t want to get all sentimental about it but it was strange knowing she wasn’t just in the next room writing letters. When she freed me from my demon I had taken it for granted that she and I were stuck together, well, until someone finally managed to assassinate me. Now if I wanted to annoy her I would have to write a letter, dispatch it, and wait for her to reply. Even with my fastest messenger it would still take days and I wouldn’t even get to see the look on her face as I said yet another thing I shouldn’t have.

I realized with dawning horror on the third day that I would have to go through three more weeks of this, at the very least. _I shouldn’t have let her go_, I thought. Her father probably wasn’t _that_ ill and even if he was, it was dangerous for the tsarina to travel with such a small retinue of guards (she didn’t want to be wasteful), the roads were badly in need of repair (another thing I shouldn’t have neglected) and the weather had been unpredictable of late (well that one I had nothing to do with). 

I was brooding in my study on the fourth day when a messenger arrived with a letter from my dear tsarina. I could have wept with joy at the sight of her neat handwriting sprawling over half a dozen pages. For the letter to arrive today, she must written it just after she left, most probably after the palace gates shut behind her carriage.

What would she need to write to me about this early in her journey? It couldn’t have been anything but more instructions for her philanthropic pursuits. And sure enough, the first page detailed her plans for the convent of scholarly nuns she wanted to endow. I had never been more happy to read about land grants and rent rolls in my life.


End file.
